On Tuesday, February 4, 2003, at 01:18 PM, Stephane Ducasse wrote:
Hi all,
I'm one of the lucky guys working with nathanael here and I can tell you what is really needed for traits :
- a clean classBuilder (we may do that)
- a real clean ***from scratch*** browser that we could use (and not
patching again this BAD browser)
- a real scanner/parser/AST that is not buggy.
Don't think that I'm too strong, I'm just right. I tried to build a pretty printer with Squeak, nathanael patched everywhere Squeak and now we are at the limits.
I've felt the need for this recently as well. It seems like reworking the core compiler/browser/debugger tools would useful for two reasons:
We seem to have quite a few experimental browser improvements floating around: StarBrowser, PackageBrowser, RefactoringBrowser, TestBrowser, StackingBrowser, and TraitsBrowser spring to mind, there may be more. It would be nice to be able to combine some of these browsers - to be able to do refactoring and traits from the StarBrowser for example. Even those "differing" browsers that can't combine nicely with others from a layout point of view could benefit from a common code base - a kind of general browsing framework.
A lot of the development tools we're building need to analyze code, both within methods, and across the entire image. Nathanael's Traits analysis tool is one example, but there are others. It wouldn't be hard to imagine Daniel's SpaghettiTracer work evolving into a DependecyBrowser of some kind. At the other end of the scale, Monticello could do a better job of detecting conflicts if it analysed method ASTs instead of just comparing source code.
So yeah, I think this is a good idea.
Colin